ships with Intel 3945 or 4965
Option GTM 378 3G modem
no BIOS lock, so other WLAN/WWAN cards work, but may have incompatible LED indication or radio killswitch
Bluetooth v2.0 by internal USB dongle

Linux Compatibility

Device

Compatibility

Comments

Processor

Yes

Screen

Partial

Some versions of intel driver stretch lower resolutions across the entire screen, others keep the aspect ratio and put black bands around the sides as default. You can change the behaviour by setting the “scaling mode” property.
Backlight control requires workaround. See below.

Notes

PCIe ExpressCard Hotplug

“Slow” ExpressCards such as 3G modems use USB and work out of the box. “Fast” ExpressCards such as SATA controllers use PCIe which needs its link set up either by ACPI (this doesn't work in Linux) or by OS (this works, but needs to be enabled). To fix this issue, you need to add “pciehp.pciehp_force=1” to the kernel command line. In Ubuntu and other distributions using Grub2, the best way to do this is to edit /etc/default/grub and add it to the default options:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="pciehp.pciehp_force=1 quiet splash"

<note important>Don't forget to apply these changes by running

sudo update-grub2

</note>

Backlight control

See Kernel bug #25482. Similar to the above, the best way to fix this is to modify the kernel commandline from grub configuration.

Internal USB devices not present, suspend-to-RAM problems

The BIOS in this machine is rather buggy and sometimes after changing the configuration in BIOS setup (especially that regarding the internal peripherals) the laptop doesn't behave according to the config or exhibits problems suspending or waking up from suspend. This problem is usually fixed by resetting the BIOS setup to defaults, rebooting a setting it up once afterwards.

Sound in older distros

Older distributions such as Kubuntu Hardy 8.04 have problems detecting and switching between headphone output and internal speaker. You can fix this by compiling alsa (needs to be done on every kernel update)